Emotional strategies and their relationship to complaints of psychosomatic and neurotic symptoms.

Examined the emotional strategies that people use and their psychological consequences. On the basis of a questionnaire answered by 270 adults, two questions were selected that would categorize people into "emotional strategy" groups; i.e., emotives and suppressed-emotives. A second sample of 329 psychotherapy group participants were classified according to their emotional strategy and also were scored on a Complaint Questionnaire (CQ) designed to measure psychological maladjustment and psychosomatic complaints. Suppressed-emotives had a significantly higher score on the CQ than the emotive and non-emotive groups. Because the CQ is similar to other questionnaires that have been shown to differentiate diagnosed "neurotics" from normals, we conclude that suppressed-emotives should be distinguished from non-emotives in that the former show neurotic tendencies, while the latter do not.